Archive for the ‘ideas’ Category

In the MindManager Library there is a section called Shapes. It contains three folders: Ovals, Rectangles and Rounded Rectangles. Any of these shapes can be applied to a topic by dragging and dropping or selecting a topic and then clicking the required shape. This can be used to give another level of emphasis to your maps. If you need to change the colour of a shape or remove / add a dot, duplicate and then open in your image editor.

I created a new shape from my logo by editing it and adding a boundary in Paint.net. I also gave a it a transparent background. Then I added it to Shape Library and used it for the central topic of the map. You can see in the map some of my choices may not be that clever. If the shape had been applied to the main or subtopics the background would not be an issue.

This morning I was creating a new shape from a sandcastle image during an online client training session. It soon be came apparent that the aspect ratio of the shape image is dependent on the text string height and width. You need to choose shapes that look good when crushed, stretched or otherwise distorted!

There are a few ways to mitigate the distortion:1. Control the text width in Format Topic or by dragging the left and right text boundaries2. Font size and type3. Edit Content Margins in the Library Shape or Format Topic > Size and Margins. See the map.

Does anyone have some great examples of custom shapes in their MindManager maps?

MindManager has the ability to include background images and colour. This can be used to brand and watermark your maps, to have a background image which is relevant to the map content or create a subtle and pleasing graphic effect. You need to experiment to get this right. A bad background can distract from the purpose of the map. You have seen people do it with PowerPoint beware of doing it to your maps.

The easiest to way to set these up is to right click the background of a map to reveal the Background settings. These include colour, image selection, transparency, a variety of tiling effects and access to a background image library.

A few tips:

In the Print > Page Setup, you can enable/disable the background from printing. Best to disable when you have single colour background. You will use a lot of ink and with some printers have a soggy sheet of paper! You can do this for PDFs as well.

The Paper set of background images can be used to give you a grid to line up your topics horizontally and vertically. You can turn it off before publishing.

You can have both an image and colour. Adjust image transparency to let the colour show through.

I will publish my result and my tips for this process in a couple of days.

If you want a more elaborate test. Record how many topics and words after 60s, 120s & 180s. Just put a marker in the map and count them at the end of the test. I wonder if there is a trend that one third is more productive than another.

If you are not a MindManager users but you do the test, please publish your results and the application you used.

I just “lost” some folders when I moved them from one disc to another. In Windows Explorer you cannot see the folder “organigram”. You can only see the the contents of one folder at a time. So hunting for the lost folders was getting a bit frustrating.